Weekend reads

An antidote to predictions that technology is at the gates and preparing to lay waste to all that lies before it, Tomorrow’s People and New Technology, by Professor Felix Dodds, is more of a glass half full look at the future. It explores the impact the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have on peoples’ lives by 2030 and asks how technologies, including AI, biotechnology, IoT, and big data will come to shape every aspect of it. ‘We’re trying to help people think ‘wow’, he told me on an episode of Inside Ideas, adding that ‘the book is trying to make the future not seem scary. There are so many books out there that talk about the technology advance and it being a scary world, and talk about the challenges as opposed to the positives.’

The Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina and an Associate Fellow at the Tellus Institute also lists what he calls the jobs of the future. Garbage designers, where you are taking garbage and making it into things that people want, personal data brokers, classroom avatar managers, and the weather modification police, are among the next generation of jobs the book makes predictions about.

Catch up with the full podcast for more from the pages of: Tomorrow’s People and New Technology: Changing How We Live Our Lives.

Maria Rodale is a renowned author and activist who has spent her career in the family publishing business: Rodale Inc, which published such classics as: The Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore and Onward, by Howard Schultz. In Organic Manifesto, Rodale advocates for focusing more on how we grow things rather than what we eat, and she outlines the cost of chemical farming on our health and our environment. “There are two ways to look at food: there is what you ingest and how it is grown. And how it is grown is more important to everyone than what you actually eat,” Maria said. “What you eat is personal, and that is about personal liberty and freedom. Some want vegan, and that’s great, others want meat, and that’s great. But how food is grown is collective, it is a communal thing. Chemicals affect all our health, whether you eat that food or not, chemicals disable the soil from storing carbon which impacts all of us. So we need to shift our paradigm to thinking who cares what you’re eating, let’s care about how we are growing and let’s care about the impact the way we grow things has on all of us.”

Catch up with the full podcast for more from the pages of: Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe.

Check out our book resources page for more recommendations.